1) Quite a few folks are asking when Glenn and I are going to next teach the three seminars we developed and taught all over the world last year: Lessons from the Trenches: Value Investing Bootcamp, How to Launch and Build an Investment Fund, and an Advanced Seminar on Short Selling. The answer is, given the upcoming launch of Empire Financial Research, we haven’t scheduled anything and probably won’t for a while – later this year at the earliest.

Get Our Activist Investing Case Study!

Get the entire 10-part series on our in-depth study on activist investing in PDF. Save it to your desktop, read it on your tablet, or print it out to read anywhere! Sign up below!

All three seminars are, however, available on video – but only for another few weeks, so don't wait to register! (Once you do so, you'll have access to all of them for a full year, as well as permanent copies of all of the slides we teach from).

Top value fund managers are ready for the small cap bear market to be done

During the bull market, small caps haven't been performing well, but some believe that could be about to change. Breach Inlet Founder and Portfolio Manager Chris Colvin and Gradient Investments President Michael Binger both expect small caps to take off. Q1 2020 hedge fund letters, conferences and more However, not everyone is convinced. BTIG strategist Read More

More information about them is posted here, and you can check out free sample videos and register here, here and here. There are big discounts if you register for all three, as well as for students and investors under 30 – just email me for details.

2) I’m scratching my head about what investors could possibly be thinking these days with Mondelez (MDLZ). I owned the stock a couple of years ago because I thought Kraft Heinz (KHC) would make a bid for it, but now that that’s off the table, I can’t figure out why it’s at an all-time high, trading at 3.3x sales, 16.8x trailing EV/EBITDA and 20.8x trailing EPS.

KHC’s woes are bad news for MDLZ for three reasons: a) KHC isn’t going to bid for it; b) most of the headwinds affecting KHC are impacting the rest of the sector as well; and c) to the extent that some of KHC’s woes are self-inflicted (cost-cutting and price-raising that went too far), they’re addressing them, which is bad news for competitors.

3) This Heard on the Street article in today’s Wall Street Journal, U.S. Cannabis Law Is Helping Canada Make Hay, reminded me of an article I included in an email a couple of weeks ago about how regulators are supposedly investigating short sellers (SEC, OSC examine short-sellers’ tactics). I just learned that the author of this article, Christina Pellegrini, has just left the Globe and Mail to…wait for it...go work for a cannabis company!

Hmmm, you think there might be a relationship between this and her making a 180-degree turn, going from being objective and unbiased in her earlier reporting on the sector to writing favorable articles about the cannabis industry and highly criticizing short sellers???

It reminds me of one of Munger’s favorite sayings, a German proverb: “Whose bread I eat, his song I sing…”

4) In contrast, here’s a story by someone doing real journalism, David Milstead, also at the Globe and Mail: How two Canadian financiers took an obscure Apple reseller for a wild ride. In it, Milstead exposes how Andy “the goat f***er” DeFrancesco (click here to see what Gabriel Grego exposed about his dirty deeds at Aphria at my shorting conference in December) and Aaron Serruya, who is also up to his eyeballs in the cannabis sector, engineered a blatant pump-and-dump last year of an obscure company, Cool Holdings (which, it won’t surprise anyone to learn, is based in Miami; the only scammier place in the country is Boca; watch out for Nevada and Utah as well…).

Last May, DeFrancesco and Serruya joined the board of a tiny, money-losing company called InfoSonics, which sold smartphones in Latin America. A month later, they renamed it Cool Holdings and gave it a new stock ticker AWSM (“awesome” – get it?).

Then, they paid some shady companies to write highly promotional articles, which goosed the stock from around $3 to a high of $22.61 on September 21 before it collapsed (of course), as you can see in this chart:

I’m sure you will be shocked – shocked! – to hear that the company hasn’t issued a press release since October and its auditor as well as both DeFrancesco and Serruya resigned in December.

Have you recently carried heavy shopping bags up a few flights of stairs? Or run the last 100 meters to the station to catch your train? If you have, you may have unknowingly been doing a style of exercise called high-intensity incidental physical activity.

Our paper, published today in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, shows this type of regular, incidental activity that gets you huffing and puffing is likely to produce health benefits, even if you do it in 30-second bursts, spread over the day.

In fact, incorporating more high-intensity activity into our daily routines—whether that’s by vacuuming the carpet with vigor or walking uphill to buy your lunch—could be the key to helping all of us get some high quality exercise each day. And that includes people who are overweight and unfit.

Jacob Wolinsky is the founder of ValueWalk.com, a popular value investing and hedge fund focused investment website. Jacob worked as an equity analyst first at a micro-cap focused private equity firm, followed by a stint at a smid cap focused research shop. Jacob lives with his wife and four kids in Passaic NJ. -
Email: jacob(at)valuewalk.com - Twitter username: JacobWolinsky - Full Disclosure: I do not purchase any equities anymore to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest and because at times I may receive grey areas of insider information. I have a few existing holdings from years ago, but I have sold off most of the equities and now only purchase mutual funds and some ETFs. I also own a few grams of Gold and Silver

FOLLOW VALUEWALK ON

ABOUT VALUEWALK

ValueWalk.com is a highly regarded, non-partisan site – the website provides unique coverage on hedge funds, large asset managers, and value investing. ValueWalk also contains archives of famous investors, and features many investor resource pages.

The Life and Career of Charlie Munger

You can learn from Charlie Munger firsthand via this incredible ebook and over a dozen other famous investor studies by signing up below:Charlie is more than just Warren Buffett’s friend and Berkshire Hathaway’s Vice Chairman – Buffett has actually credited him with redefining how he looks at investing. Now you can learn from Charlie firsthand via this incredible ebook and over a dozen other famous investor studies by signing up below:

Learn from the best and forever change your investing perspective

One incredible tidbit of knowledge after another in the page-turning masterpiece of a book

Discover the secrets to Charlie’s success and how to apply it to your investing